Scholars have never agreed on which specific word led to the Third World War, but the most popular theory is that the British people finally refused to tolerate any corruption of their native language by “Americanisms” through movies and media overexposure. Indeed, several governmental panels and NGOs formed before the war to ensure the purity of British English, similar to France’s “Académie française”. They’d responded to the national teacher’s strike of ‘32, which according to urban legend began after Sir Jenkins of Oxford University discovered the word “color” in one of his exam papers.

Whatever the cause, the Eastern Seaboard invasion was immediately devastating. American troops responded bravely to the unexpected British forces landing on their beaches. Unfortunately, the lobster trade suffered greatly from the invasion: robbed of their prime means of support, the American forces were quickly overwhelmed, finally retreating to Fort New York and Fort New Jersey. In-fighting between the forts left them unprepared for an S.A.S. raid, which single-handedly impressed the confused army into submission.

Despite this defeat, President McMurdoch’s “Line-in-the-Sand” scheme rallied many of the overseas forces – chiefly those fighting in New Zealand, Antarctica, and Atlantis – to form an overland blockade, preventing further progress. Frantic negotiations were conducted through the United Nations Security Council, but progress slowed under Britain’s Prime Minister Love of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. He refused to accept any demand “spoken in a Yankee accent”, and insisted any treaty between both countries be written according to “BBC Guidelines”.

Meanwhile, Canada launched its own offensive on the northern states. At the time, the Second Civil War had already ravaged the United States of America due to inevitable conflicts between the chiefly southern Republicans and the chiefly northern Democrats. The civil war’s beginnings are no mystery; tired of the Democrats’ constant censoring of anything that didn’t mention Global Warming, the Republicans pooled their modest resources from the oil, mining, factory farming, and arms industries to crush anything north of the Bible Belt.

The Democrats were already in dire straits, many having apparently convinced themselves that righteousness was sufficient armour, when the Canadian offensive swept aside any remaining resistance. As a mark of nationalistic defiance, the Canadians wore their traditional dress; it remains the only war in history where one side fought entirely with hockey sticks. Republican attempts to predict future attacks by decoding Canadian communications were hampered by the infamous “EH?” system.

By now, Queen Victoria II had taken a keen interest in the expanding British Empire, and what was originally the White Man’s Burden v2.0 became a juggernaut, sweeping across Asia and Africa, leaving green tea and devastation in its wake. Confidential documents – later released by MI22 – revealed that conquering the United States became the national priority. Within days of peace talks failing, Prime Minister Love organized an emergency COBRA meeting, declared America the “number one place in need of civilizing influences”, and sent a direct order to the revived Royal Air Force to commence Operation: Clear-The-Table.

Within three hours, ten thousand Prematurely-Bald Eagle jets left the reopened factories in Yorkshire, flew across the Atlantic, and swept across the United States. At the same time, Queen Victoria II delivered on live television her famous speech: “Stiff Upper Lip, My Arse”. Legend says, though the claim is easy to disprove, that Hollywood too was bombed at the precise moment she read the immortal line: “The poison is red, the poison is blue; it seeped into Blighty, and pissed me off too.”

Naturally, the decision to use nuclear explosives immediately became a source of controversy among the British public. One benefit, however, was undeniable; Canada ceased all military operations and spontaneously voted to annul its commonwealth status. Like Atlantis, it voluntarily re-joined the British Empire and accepted full sovereignty under the queen. The purple flag of royalty – an appropriate replacement, ever since the original Union Jack was criticised for being “too American-ish” – now flies proudly over every major governmental institution throughout the world.

There were many – once outside the British Empire, when such a thing was possible – who claimed that the entire American affair was an overreaction. Cultural contagion, they insisted, was not worth the immeasurable loss of life, irradiation of an entire continent, and bad language from the queen. To which, one can only quote Her Majesty’s final line: “If some arrogant bastard’s gonna bugger up our lingo, then it should be the original arrogant bastards. At least we’d do it properly.”